It’s often said that competition is good for consumers, as businesses will compete based on price, quality, or both, which leads to better goods or better prices for society. Efficiency is seen as being good for economic progress, too, and increases in technology are said to make things cheaper for individuals over time. But I’m […]
Wasted Time
For all of the positive things I can say about taking a year off, there’s one negative thing that has become abundantly clear to me: I suck at time management. I don’t completely know what goes into this. On the one hand, I really despise the obsession with productivity that reduces the value of people […]
Excessive Professionalism
Some people really have a heart for business, worker conditions, training, and education, and that’s something the world needs. However, there is a widespread disease of excessive professionalism that has invaded everything. For whatever reasons, this seems to be very prominent in Asian countries. In China, the “996” lifestyle means working from 9am to 9pm, […]
Tech Layoffs and Systemic Inflexibility
Last night, I stumbled across some new social media site in which a lot of people were talking about their layoffs or fear of future layoffs from big tech companies, and some were pretty detailed and terrified. It got me thinking (“always a dangerous thing!”). First of all, I’m not unsympathetic. I have friends who […]
Career Economics
I made the mistake of starting to reread Jacob Fisker’s “Early Retirement Extreme”, and it has me fired up on a few things. One of the best points made in the book, in my opinion, is that specialization can be represented as a narrow but tall curve on a grid where the x axis represents […]
In Defense of Paying Off Your Mortgage Early
A number of people even in the FIRE community will often sing the praises of not paying off your mortgage. The idea is that if you can lock in a low interest rate, you can pay the minimum on it while investing the rest in something like the stock market, which will likely have higher […]
Voices of Discouragement
I had a coworker at my first software job who, despite being a friend, was also insensitive and demeaning on more than a few occasions, not just toward me but also toward others. He was very technically capable, and for that reason it was hard to dismiss his technical criticism. However, one day I was […]
Reflections on Cloud Computing and Monthly Expenditures
A large portion of the software and IT industries have refocused in recent years on “cloud computing”, a term that refers to running things over the internet instead of on premises. I believe this buzzword originated from the practice of representing the internet as a cloud on old network diagrams. I’m not a huge fan. […]
The System is Always Right!!!
These are brief, scattered, cynical thoughts, but I wanted to write them out. I’ve noticed that people who did really well in school are very quick to defend the educational system, and it’s like, “Yeah, of course you enjoyed it – it worked for you”, whereas many other people had very different experiences and consequently […]
Brief Thoughts on Spreading Yourself Too Thin
I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve accomplished this past year, and while I read several books that were great, I also feel that I didn’t focus enough on the books I had, as several remain unfinished. Most interesting of these books were a few I had on the Tibetan language. After my first trip to […]